(Quick note: rather than making a single, huge post no one will read through, I have decided to make a mini-series of articles about the evolution of videogame music preservation and the role 16bap had in it. Several announcement will be made afterwards to keep everyone updated with the most important things going on in our project. Please stay tuned: huge changes are coming and we’re going to need help.)

On the 19th of October in 2012, the 16-bit Audiophile Project was born.
Its origins and goals were humble: in a world where soundtracks available on Youtube and forums were recorded mostly from (inaccurate) emulators, 16bap wanted to show how different real hardware sounded, and do it using the best recording equipment I could personally afford.

This wouldn’t have been possible without the huge efforts made by Project2612, who provided VGM logs of most of the Mega Drive / Genesis library, and Deadfish Shitware, who not only provided a software to play the VGM files on original hardware, but even modified it for us so that we could achieve more accurate timing.

And so, off we went, ripping and sharing music with the world recorded from authentic hardware.
I was astonished to find mixed responses to our work: there were those who were (and are) delighted with our releases and those that felt the sound was muffled, bass-heavy and lacked sparkle. It turned out that there are people that have never heard how a real Mega Drive sounded and their experience was limited to emulators such as Gens and KEGA which sounded way different from real hardware.
This was interesting to me, because while people each have different tastes and ideas on what kind of sound signature they enjoy, I understood that it was important to archive music in its original form, the way it played via its own circuitry.
I started wondering not only about recording quality, but other important aspects such as achieving perfect timing.
For casual listening purposes, no one would notice a 1% difference in speed (and, as a consequence, pitch), but when an expert ear starts listening to certain tracks critically, that 1% becomes easily detectable.

This became apparent after few years when some people started questioning our work and showing evidence that something was off.
Little we knew that there were people so passionate that went to the length of listening critically to our work and comparing it with their own Mega Drives. Their feedback would  lead to one of the turning point in our project, one which would eventually lead us into re-recording from scratch our releases in what became known as “Rematsters”…

To be continued…

Katcho is back with another big release: EX-Ranza, known outside of Japan as Ranger-X!

This is quite a big release and with 4 bonus tracks which are unused during normal gameplay.

Also, this marks an important milestone in our project as this is the first release made using the new and improved VGM Player, courtesy of the immensely talented Deadfish Shitware.
We’ve already discussed what’s changed from the previous version but the two big things, to put it short are:

1 – The old VGM Player’s speed was off by 0,00479%. Yes, that’s a ridiculously small amount and I’d dare anyone telling the difference, but there it is. Now we have perfect timing down to each cycle.
2 – We’re now able to completely disable video circuitry while recording, thus reducing noise to an imperceptible amount.

Katcho himself reported that he really couldn’t tell a difference from our previous VGM Player, which should tell you a lot about how we’re splitting hairs here, but as people have been using our releases to improve their own work (mainly emulation – including FPGAs) we now take it upon ourselves to provide the best quality and most accurate rips of Mega Drive material.

I hope I’ll have some time in the near future to write a small article about a recent discovery which has put us even closer to our ultimate goal.
A small hint: in a previous article, where we talked about MDFourier, we said how we made a complete shot in the dark by choosing a particular Mega Drive revision along with a fix for its output stage, hoping that it would come close to what a developer kit would sound like. Well, we have now one evidence that we might have done just the right choice.

Thanks to Katcho for another contribution and all of you for following us and stay tuned for more information!

Get ready for another contribution from Richard Mixin: Whip Rush!

With this release we’ve officially run out of contributions for now. I know Richard is working on others but those might take some time before they’re ready.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about another way of contributing to the project so that we can get back archiving music ourselves with a bit of help from our community.

I’ll flesh this idea out in the following days and make a proper post to let you know how you can help out!

If you’re interested in contributing and you feel confident in your audio knowledge and recording equipment, we’re always accepting new contributions!
Just make sure to adhere to our guidelines and you’re good to go!

See you soon!

Albeit with a little delay here goes this week’s new release from our contributor, Richard Mixin!

His release include even 3 bonus tracks which look like to be unused during normal gameplay, it’s great to have them included!

Let me take the opportunity to remember to all of our contributors that while including beta/unused tracks is not required, it is absolutely welcome!

I’m also thinking about ways to improve my own workflow and I may need in the future some collaborators which, similar to our contributors, will help us out in archiving Mega Drive’s soundtracks, but won’t require any technical knowledge about recording and all that scary stuff in our terrible awful incomprehensible (vastly) improvable guidelines.

So stay tuned, hopefully I’ll soon make my mind up and let you know about other ways to contribute to our goal!

Ladies and gentlemen we’re back!

Today we’re delighted to share yet another contribution from Richard Mixin: Target Earth.

As always, we’re going to be back here next week with another release from our contributors, so stay tuned!